It’s not every day someone discovers their family is worth billions—after they’ve already finished college. But that’s exactly what happened to Peter Buffett, the son of investing legend Warren Buffett, who says he didn’t truly grasp their wealth until his 20s. The trigger? A casual conversation with his mom after his dad’s name showed up on Forbes’ list of the richest Americans.
“There he was, on this list,” Peter said during a roundtable at Forbes’ Second Annual Summit on Philanthropy in 2013. “And we laughed about it, because we said, ‘Well, isn’t it funny? You know, we know who we are, but everybody’s treating us differently now.'” He added, “Our friends were as surprised as I was.”
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Warren Buffett, whose net worth now places him permanently among the top billionaires in the world, was sitting next to his son at the summit. The topic of the event: how to raise grounded kids in a world of generational wealth and private jets. Buffett’s answer? Strip the glitz, skip the luxury, and let the kids ride the bus.
“Our kids had a very normal growing-up,” Buffett said. “They did not ride in private planes. They went to school on the bus.” He pointed out that the family never moved into bigger, flashier homes—even though he could’ve bought dozens. “I’ve only lived in one primary house that I’ve owned in my life, and I bought that in 1958.”
Their home life stayed remarkably low-profile. The Buffett kids attended public school, just like their mother had. The family lived in a middle-class Omaha neighborhood where, Buffett noted, “in today’s dollars, our neighbors were making maybe $75,000 a year.” That financial modesty was no accident—but it also wasn’t a performance. Buffett simply wasn’t interested in lifestyle inflation.
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“I just lived the life I wanted to live, and my wife lived the life she wanted to live,” he told Forbes. “There wasn’t anything that we wanted that we didn’t have, but we didn’t crave a lot of possessions.”
At one point, Buffett didn’t even have an office—despite managing millions. “For six years I worked at home out of a room off my bedroom and had no secretary and no bookkeeper,” he said. “So there was no reason for our kids to develop any unusual feelings about money.”
By the time Peter found out just how wealthy his father was, the groundwork had already been laid. “The kids were formed by that time,” Warren said. “And they knew who their friends were, and their friends were their friends because they liked ‘em, and not because they were the rich kid on the block.”
Even after seeing his father’s name on the billionaire list, Peter didn’t feel a need to reshape his identity. “We didn’t live in that world or a cultural framework where there was a lot of wealth being shown,” he said. “It was a fascinating switch, although not a huge one.”
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That switch—between knowing who you are and how others suddenly treat you—is the tension that many ultra-wealthy families struggle to manage. But Buffett never seemed all that interested in playing the game. His goal wasn’t to raise rich kids. It was to raise good ones.
And judging by the fact that it took Peter until adulthood to realize he was heir to a fortune, the plan worked.
12 years after that Forbes summit, Buffett still lives in the same Omaha home. It’s tucked in the Dundee neighborhood, where the average house goes for about $421,000 in 2025, though his is estimated at around $1.37 million, according to Zillow. Modest by billionaire standards—and clearly, just the way he likes it.
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